Michael Winner's got married, Chris Evans has stopped drinking and Martin
Clunes is entertaining the Pony Club – are they all under the influence of
Comet Elenin?

Listen up all you conspiracy theorists. Judgement Day is upon us. Nasa may be poo-pooing the hysterical internet rumours that Comet Elenin, which has just penetrated our inner solar system, will bring about gravitational collapse, thermonuclear fission, or astrophysical fusion, but there are alarming signs that some Well-Known Stars have been cosmically reordered in the most disturbing ways.

First up confirmed curmudgeon Michael Winner has morphed into a besotted bridegroom of unexpected tendresse. This, just as hard-partying DJ Chris Evans has turned teetotal and boozy Martin Clunes’s transformation from jaunty pioneer-cum-poster boy of the FHM (Feckless Hormonal Male) Movement into a highly respectable denizen of the Pony Club set in leafy Dorset.

Oh, and potty-mouth comedian Frank Skinner has undergone such a Pauline conversion to Smells and Bells that he is condemning atheists as the greatest threat to humanity since climate change deniers.

Mere coincidence? Or malign celestial cataclysm?

The Deathwish director, although raffishly likeable, is a man possessed of such a monstrously dirigible ego that it interferes with passing aircraft. His attitude towards women has been, well, less than gallant on occasions. Yet yesterday, in an act of deeply suspicious selflessness, he married his longsuffering girlfriend, Geraldine Lynton-Edwards.

They first met in 1957, when she was a 16-year-old classically trained dancer, and he was a 21-year-old director making his first movie. He cast her, gave her a line and in the intervening decades they enjoyed a mostly off, occasionally on relationship, before becoming an item in 2002 (although there was a temporary cessation of intimacies when she discovered, three years later, that he was having an affair with his then-secretary).

Now, aged 76, he has thrown caution to the winds and has taken the marital plunge, without so much as a pre-nup with which to saddle his new wife in debt when he shuffles off to that great Powell and Pressburger film set in the sky.

If that doesn’t convince you of the uncanny alignment of the heavenly spheres then Chris Evans’s born-again disavowal of drink might. The 45-year-old, who was fined £7,000 by the BBC in 1995 after a 17-hour pub crawl ended two hours before he was due to go on air at Radio One, has always appeared rather proud of his prodigious appetite for excess. But after a recent prolonged session with Prince Harry, which began after a fundraiser, he underwent an epiphany and decided it was time to pass the boozing baton to the third in line to the throne, where, I’m sure we all agree, it will be in tremendously safe hands.

As a clear-headed Evans chirrups his way through his Radio Two breakfast show, he can be assured of a delighted reception from Martin Clunes, who has metamorphosised from grumpy Doc Martin, purveyor of pills and misery, to a hail-fellow-well-met gentleman farmer, who hosts the local gymkhana in his field every year.

It’s hard not to shed a tear of nostalgia for the good old bad boys. Does this herald the ushering in of a younger generation of squeaky clean Justin Biebers and drearily sensible role models? Without our legacy of colourful cads and wayward eccentrics, I fear that life would be dull.

Next thing we know the BBC chairman Lord Patten will be demanding more older women on the screen. He has?

Something seismic is clearly underway in the grand scheme of things, because, frankly it’s just not natural. And what might be the origin of this discommodious Deus ex machina? Over at www.theendoftheworld.com there’s a bit of argy-bargy about the Nostradamus End of the World versus the Mayan Calendar End of the World and an apologetic acknowledgement that the world didn’t end on May 21 last year as promised, but word among the lunatic fringes is that Something is Up.

On October 16, Comet Elenin will be at its closest to Earth – a terrifying 21.7 million miles away and the fearmongers claim that the authorities have ruthlessly suppressed pictures of it. Experts have hit back with the explosive revelation that the reason for the lack of intergovernmental information is that – as comets go Elenin is a bit small and boring.

However, as our lovable rogues are picked off one by one, teatime telly scoundrels rehabilitated, sinners – and Winners – made into saints, the gaiety of our nation is under threat from forces unseen. The sooner they are identified and destroyed the better. For while the universe per se may not be in peril, it looks suspiciously as though the world as we know it has come to an end.